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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/29108604">What She Had to Do</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/BlueSakura007/pseuds/BlueSakura007'>BlueSakura007</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>Jen’s Fictional Male Characters and Female OC Short Stories [3]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Alternate Ending, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Escape, F/M, Fluff, Forbidden Love, Light Angst, On the Run, Post-Star Trek: Into Darkness, Revenge, Strong Female Characters, Tenderness</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2021-02-03</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2021-03-09</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-13 03:34:35</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>7</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>22,636</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/29108604</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/BlueSakura007/pseuds/BlueSakura007</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>It’s been nearly two years since Khan Noonien Singh was placed into an eternal cryogenic sleep with his seventy-two Augment companions after the events of Into Darkness. Two years since Enterprise security chief commander Zinalya Hamilton, as a result, had her future torn away from her and was left with hopeless longing for the man she’d grown to adore - an adoration which was reciprocated. But she’s not going to give Khan up without a fight.<br/>She just needs to make it past the front gates of a secure Starfleet facility and then through said facility to the equally secure hangar where he and the others are being held. Without getting caught.</p><p>[Basically a Khan x OC jailbreak fic, which is set after the alternate sad ending of Undeniable, because in the happy ending there’s no need for said jailbreak in the first place.  :)]</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>James T. Kirk/Carol Marcus, Khan Noonien Singh | John Harrison/Original Female Character(s), Khan Noonien Singh/Original Female Character(s), Spock/Nyota Uhura</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>Jen’s Fictional Male Characters and Female OC Short Stories [3]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/series/2020570</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>4</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>4</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>1. How to Defrost a Cryotube</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>The afternoon sunlight, despite being cold and much more white than yellow, was nonetheless harsh despite being hidden behind a vast cloudy curtain. On a certain small island nearby, Lady Liberty, as always, stood proudly with her torch aloft as though she were watching over the surrounding lands like a mighty extradimensional being born to live solely as a benevolent overseer.</p><p>On the subject of mighty women, a young Starfleet officer was standing only about four feet away from the front gates of the facility known as Sierra-Lambda 3, which was owned and operated by this very same organisation. An officer with burgundy hair, glimmering hazel-green eyes and a few Trill spots going from the top of either side of her forehead down to her neck and then her toes, and who was currently twenty-seven years old as of the previous day; she also happened to be the very same woman who was a key individual in the court tribunal that took place a little bit over two years prior regarding a certain superhuman and the events of his quest for vengeance.</p><p>"Could you show us your transport order, ma’am?" A burly guard in front of her requested, a phaser rifle strapped to his back, to which commander Zinalya Hamilton - who was promoted several months beforehand - handed over a translucent rectangular data pad to him. Her current getup consisted of the grey jacket, skirt and peaked cap of her dress uniform with immaculately-polished black leather boots. <br/>After holding the pad in his left hand and scrolling down on it with his right to fully read over what was on it, a few seconds passed before he looked up again and nodded. "Okay." He pulled a smaller handheld device with a keypad out of his pocket, akin to a tricorder, and entered several passcode keys on it, upon which the gates smoothly and gradually slid open from the middle, in the same way as the doors of a turbolift. </p><p>You see, these contents of the data pad she’d just handed over were forged orders from a higher-up officer, a Caitian named admiral S'toia, for the transport of a batch of photon torpedoes to Starfleet Headquarters for further research, complete with the equally fake required signature from the above-mentioned admiral. The reason behind this ploy was that Sierra-Lambda 3 was holding a specific something which she wanted, and from what she’d gathered there’d most likely be no way she would be permitted to take it - specifically, there was a man in the belly of that facility, stuck there like some kind of houseplant in a state where he could never age.</p><p>The guard, along with another who had been standing several meters to his right with his own rifle being actually held in his hands, both led Zinalya through the now open gates and across the wide tarmac path that led up to the actual entrance doors themselves. Her dress uniform, especially the peaked cap on her head, and the assertive way she carried herself which was the usual way she walked while on duty on the USS <em>Enterprise </em>all added together to make her look like a goddess of war right now. After all, this body language was most often needed during this on-duty times to establish herself as a dominant and combat-ready force due to her being the ship's chief of security, but the valiant look on her face which was used to match it was different this time: on this particular occasion, the fire in the gaze of her eyes was of a newfound craftiness. For the last year and a half or so, Zin had unintentionally but gradually given off the impression to those around her that she always had one thing or another on her mind, quietly ticking away underneath the surface encasing the cogs and gears of her brain. It caused most of them to become unsure of what she might be thinking about at any one time.  </p><p> </p><p>"Sir, there's an officer from the <em>Enterprise</em> here to see you about an order of torpedo transport from admiral S'toia. It's commander Hamilton." The second guard, the one who'd remained silent during the exchange at the gates, said upon approaching the director of the facility, another Starfleet admiral called Nathaniel Fletcher. This man was inside the foyer beyond the the entrance doors, talking to two other men and a woman who were all dressed in form-fitting white tunics and matching trousers and shoes, the woman holding a data pad of her own under her right forearm and one of these two men being a Vulcan. "I've already just checked this order myself."</p><p>"Thank you Mr. Perez." Admiral Fletcher was a man in his early fifties with greying blonde hair and light brown eyes, who, like Zinalya while on duty, carried himself with an aura of confidence, but he was capable of the occasional instances for letting his hair down. "You're dismissed." He momentarily addressed the three white-clad facility scientists he'd previously been having a discussion with, who nodded before heading off to their duties, and then turned to hold out his hand with a courteous smile. "Nice to meet you, commander. Admiral Nathaniel Fletcher."</p><p>"And you too, sir." Now it was Zinalya's turn to show her own smile in the same manner as he reached out and shook his hand. </p><p>"Shall we go up to my office so we can confirm the transport?" He briefly motioned behind him, towards a set of stairs. </p><p>"Yes sir, lead the way." She nodded her head, after which roughly the next minute and a half was the time taken for the pair to walk up these stairs, into one of several hallways on the upper floor and through said hallway on their way to the office belonging to him, past several other scientists and security guards. Sierra-Lambda 3 as a whole was, Zinalya thought to herself without saying a word about it out loud, rather like a deep underground cavern, as it appeared to be windowless and it had a hefty size to put it mildly; additionally like a dungeon complex, which was an especially fitting image considering the fact that she was looking for an imprisoned man. </p><p>"So, you've been ordered to send this request on admiral S'toia's behalf?" Asked Fletcher a couple of seconds after they'd ascended the stairs. </p><p>"That's right. Do you know her?" The half Trill hybrid put forth her own question.</p><p>"She's more of an acquaintance, but we have met once, at a conference three years back I think. She was a pretty easy person to get along with - friendly but professional."</p><p>"I'll be sure to send her your regards." A light chuckle fell from her lips.</p><p>He also chuckled to himself. "Good luck with that, she might've forgotten who I am in those three years, and like I said, it's not like we've had other meetings since then, so it's not like there's any reminders." <br/>It was shortly after this when they made it to his office, as evidenced by the fact that this was the only door where he proceeded to step through into the room behind it. After they'd both entered, the door slid shut behind them again, and it was during this time when Zin managed to momentarily take a mental note of the photographs on the wall behind his desk, one of which evidently being a picture taken of admiral Fletcher and his wife on their wedding day based on the white dress this wife was wearing and another, slightly smaller one being of a pair of young boys around the age of ten or eleven. "Have a seat, commander. Can I get you a Jack Daniel's?" </p><p>"No thanks." Zinalya took off her peaked cap and held it next to her right thigh, and gracefully sat down in one of the two armchairs sitting opposite each other in front of the desk on either side. On this desk sat a computer with table between the armchairs in addition, and all of this furniture in the office was organised neatly, including the drinks cabinet on the side of the room she was facing, where Fletcher was retrieving a bottle of Jack Daniel's Tennessee whiskey and pouring himself a glass. She took another glance at the picture of the two boys and saw more details about the photograph in the process, such as them both smiling brightly at the camera in front of a colossal tree. "Are those your sons?" </p><p>"Hm?" The admiral was confused for a second until he turned around with his now half full whiskey glass and saw the photo that she was looking at. "Oh, yeah, they are. Twins. That picture was taken at the General Sherman tree in California last Summer - I had a little shore leave time sitting around, so my wife and I went over there with them for a week as a vacation."</p><p>"I’m actually in the middle of my own shore leave myself. Well, apart from this torpedo transport business for S'toia, obviously." She fondly recalled some of the memories of the last few days she’d spent with her family as she spoke, especially the ones from yesterday, March 30th, due to it being her birthday. "I spent some time with my parents in Canada before it came through."</p><p>"Sometimes the workload just wants what the workload wants." He jokingly shrugged in reply. "And going off topic, congratulations on your promotion to full commander."</p><p>"Thank you, sir. Captain Kirk told me that most lieutenant-commanders in Starfleet apart from commander Spock don't reach that rank until they've reached thirty."</p><p>"How old are you, Miss Hamilton?" </p><p>"I'm twenty-seven." Replied Zin amicably as, at the same time, he then sat down in the other armchair directly opposite her after putting down his now empty whiskey glass on his desk.  </p><p>"You've beaten that average age to it before the inescapable adulthood of that one fateful birthday comes along." Said Fletcher, just as lightheartedly as his previous comment that he'd given a few moments ago with the shrug. There was a pause for another of these moments. "I've gotta say, I'm kinda surprised you accepted S'toia's order and came here to Sierra-Lambda 3 of all places after the business with Khan Noonien Singh's court case in San Francisco." </p><p>She nodded her head slightly. "It was a little hard for me to come knowing we're basically sitting on top of where he is right now, but it's never a good idea to ignore an order, especially one from a member of the admiralty." </p><p>"That is true." He gave his own nodding in return. </p><p>"Still, at least this whole thing means nobody who'd want to hurt Khan can get to him, though. None of them'll get the chance to defrost<em> that</em> microwave lasagne." The woman once again chuckled jocularly, causing the same reaction for the admiral in front of her. And then, after a few more seconds and while leaning herself somewhat further back against the armchair she was in, she suddenly and without warning reached into a pocket of her jacket with the same hand that she'd been using up to now for holding her peaked cap. "Seriously, how do I defrost him?" Her hand emerged again, just as quickly, with a phaser being held in it that was aimed at Fletcher across the space between them, all while she was smiling sweetly. </p><p>He felt a surge of surprise at this abrupt development, as expected, but his eyes then narrowed by a fraction confrontationally - during their conversation just now, he'd gradually gotten a tiny inkling that she had an ulterior motive up her sleeve relating to this English-accented and black-haired Augment. "This must be what you accepting the order was really all about." </p><p>"Wrong: there was no order in the first place. I just picked S'toia's name for the bluff because she turned out to be one of the higher-ups on the jury who wanted the sentence he got to be agreed to." Zinalya still maintained the smile on her face while the fire in her eyes from a few minutes ago made a reappearance. </p><p>"So you lied your way in here to pull a stunt to get your boyfriend back." Said Fletcher with a stony expression growing on his own face. Underneath this, however, he felt somewhat uneasy without admitting it, as he could see very clearly that her phaser, still unwaveringly trained on him, was on the stun setting but no one particularly relished having a weapon aimed at them nonetheless. </p><p>"You make it sound like something to be downplayed, sir." Said Zin pleasantly. "Since it sounds like you know about the court case - obviously news gets around - I've got another fun fact for you: if I had to rate the events of my life, that day scored pretty low to say the least." </p><p>"And now you think that means it's an excuse for you to come in here and just take a convicted criminal, this is getting better and better." The admiral rolled his eyes in contempt before taking a moment to eye up his desk to his right. He kept a phaser of his own in one of its drawers for if and when he might need it, and he was weighing up how quick he'd have to be in order to get to it before the younger officer opposite him could fire her own. </p><p>"I wouldn't even think about it if I were you. I can drop you before you'd get the chance to do anything." She told him immediately after noticing his gaze to the side, speaking more tersely now and making him look back at her in the process. The smile which had previously adorned her face had nearly melted away to leave only a scowl, which was brought on by what she was about to say next causing her to recall to mind the pain of it. "If you were in my position and your wife was taken from you never to return, for example, I'm sure you'd be ready to resort to the same thing I'm doing now. It's really not nice when the person you wanna be with and who you essentially realise is the other half of yourself is stolen from you, Mr. Fletcher." </p><p>"Here it comes, the life story monologue." </p><p>The wildfire already blazing through her eyes doubled in intensity at this. "You're going to listen to what I have to say whether you like it or not, because after two years I'm sick of sitting around and waiting for a change that'll never come unless I do something about it. Two <em>years</em> of having to lie in bed on some nights fooling myself that maybe if I wait long enough he'll just walk right in through the door and say that he's come back. There was a long while soon after that actual day itself where every so often I'd think to myself, 'Things can't be any worse than this'." Despite her grip on the handle of her phaser tightening in anger, she was already beginning to feel like she was healing. She'd told Scotty and Pavel about these deep emotions of hers on some occasions when they'd come to provide her with comfort during the moments of despair she'd had, but it felt even better to this time vocalise it with venom and to a man who, based on his comments, appeared to have disregarded her feelings so far. "There was also a longer while where most of the time the key for me getting over it even for just a couple of days was at the bottom of a vodka bottle. To put a long story short, one of the only things I could think about back then and still nowadays was what could've been, and after they took him away to stay frozen here until God knows when, there've been no other men who I liked. Basically, the whole thing meant in the end that apart from my job I've had no other ambitions, no future, and no life."</p><p>"I sympathise with everything you went through after he was sentenced, Miss Hamilton. But threatening me with that phaser isn't going to accomplish anything or make it any better."</p><p>"Wrong again, sir." Zinalya retorted. "You're going to tell me how to deactivate Khan's cryotube and wake him up."</p><p>"Or else what, you'll stun me?" He said. "I'm sure you and I both know that'll defeat the possibility of me being able to tell you anyway."</p><p>"Three wrongs now. If you refuse to tell me, then I can stun you and look for someone else here who'll tell me instead; if <em>you</em> won't talk, there's still dozens of others here who might. The only thing that will have changed is that the task of finding out will have just been made slightly more difficult." Another pause briefly hung in the air. "I've got no intentions of killing you or anyone else, admiral, but I'm done with living this life where I've stuck to the rules and the man I like is still kept dead to the world."</p><p>The pause made yet another comeback. "Fine." After several seconds of his eyes flicking between her phaser, Zinalya herself and the distance to the door, Fletcher grudgingly replied with this word. "There’s a passcode for activating the cryo’s defrosting process, you can put it in on my computer and do it remotely from here, but to actually wake him up after that and complete the whole revival you’ve gotta do it on the tube’s keypad." He briefly smirked to himself at the last half of this sentence - there had to be no way she’d manage to make it all the way to the Augment tubes before security stopped her. </p><p>"Care to tell me what the passcode is, sir...?" </p><p>"It’s six zero two, hyphen, seven delta tau." Said the older one of the pair. "Then the tube code for fully waking him up in person is one zero zero, omega eight omicron, in that order." </p><p>"If you’re lying to me..." Said Zinalya in a somewhat quiet and ominous tone to make her warning clear. </p><p>"I’m not lying to you, those’re the real codes, and the tubes are in Hangar 2. Now let’s see how long your memory can hold on to all that, <em>commander</em>." </p><p>One corner of her mouth curled upwards ever so slightly. "Thank you for sharing." She then, instantly after speaking, proceeded to pull the phaser’s trigger due to not really wanting to risk Fletcher running off and telling the facility’s security personnel about the plot she was now in the middle of carrying out. Zinalya got up out of the armchair following this and walked past the now unconscious admiral to the other side of his desk, where, still keeping her weapon at the ready in her right hand in case anyone else walked in, she used her other hand for turning on the computer and then searching through the list of the seventy-three cryotubes. They’d all been given identifying serial numbers by Starfleet shortly after Khan was put into stasis, and for some time this was, effectively, the only thing she had to remember him by. A number. </p><p>After a little bit of scrolling through the list, she eventually found the particular serial number she was looking for, which she selected and then typed in the keys she’d been told for the passcode: zero, two, hyphen, seven, delta and tau. She did all of this as quickly as she could, so as to make sure she was out of there as soon as possible in order to ensure that she didn’t get caught, but without rushing it to the point where it was sloppy.<br/>"Iadras, it’s me." She flipped open her Starfleet communicator, which was currently tuned to one specific channel that wasn’t anything to do with the <em>Enterprise</em>, and spoke into it. </p><p>"Go ahead." Said the man on the other end of the line, a fully Trill starship captain named Iadras Mirehl who’d agreed to let her use his ship as the metaphorical getaway car and had helped her with some parts of the actual plan itself after having heard of her plight. </p><p>"I’m in. I’ve found the right stasis tube on admiral Fletcher’s computer and put in the passcode to defrost it." Zinalya informed him. "I’ve got to head on over and press the right buttons for waking him up in person; apparently they’re all in Hangar 2."</p><p>"I’ll get the engineers working on getting the transporter lock on the other seventy-two tubes." Acknowledged Iadras. "Remember, as soon as you put in the chip, you’ll have twelve minutes to revive Khan and for the both of you to get out of there so we can beam you up with those others."</p><p>"And then if everything goes as we hoped, we can run like hell away from Federation space." She smiled. "I’ll let you know when he’s up and awake, and until then we should probably maintain radio silence."</p><p>"Okay, Mirehl out."</p><p>She reached into the same pocket from which she’d drawn her phaser a couple of minutes ago, this time retrieving an electronic microchip which contained a virus programmed by Iadras’ chief engineer. The virus would disable Fletcher’s computer - the object she was going to plug it in to - and a large majority of the facility’s security systems, providing twelve minutes of time before the backup energy supply would kick in and get said security system running again, during which the surge of this backup energy coming to life after the twelve minutes would be remotely fed to the transporter systems of Iadras’ ship via the microchip, therefore allowing them to penetrate the walls of Hangar 2 and beam out Khan’s Augment crew along with Zin and this man of the moment himself. The hangars of Sierra-Lambda 3, thanks to this facility being one of the especially secretive ones, had walls around them which blocked out other transporter signals apart from ones originating from Starfleet Headquarters.</p><p>As she held the microchip up in her fingers to look at it for a moment before initiating the rest of the plan, the smile on Zinalya’s face didn’t dissipate. </p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0002"><h2>2. Sleeping Handsome</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>In Hangar 2 of the facility, which was on the ground floor along with the other hangars, there was a cryogenic stasis tube nestled in amongst the rows of the seventy-two others around it. Said particular tube stood out from these others due to it currently being the only one whose frost on the inside was slowly melting into nothingness, and just for a moment, the lips of the occupant opened ever so slightly to, while still in his comatose state, release a small breath.</p><p>Zinalya, stolen key card in hand, swiftly moved through the upper floor not unlike a cat on a windowsill. She'd rifled through the drawers of the still knocked out admiral Fletcher's desk back in his office a minute ago and searched his pockets, both of which being in order to search for anything that might come in handy later: because of her obviously being a Starfleet officer herself, she knew that Sierra-Lambda 3, because of it having more secrecy compared to most storage facilities, had key card lock systems for getting into their hangars, so, also obviously, her gaining possession of one of these was essential. Attempting to avoid any questions about why she was wandering the halls without the company of Fletcher was the reason behind why she was moving so sneakily, which included ducking behind walls whenever she got even a slight inkling of anyone approaching from behind a corner up ahead. She additionally kept peering behind her shoulder quite a few times to ensure that there were no unwanted newcomers coming up around the corners behind her, either. There were two phasers in her pockets, one of which being the one that she brought with her from the start and threatened Fletcher with, and the other being the one that she’d found in this admiral’s desk. This second weapon was taken in her mindset that, just in case she needed extra firepower, the more phasers she had the better. </p><p>She’d cut her hair about a month prior so that instead of flowing halfway down her back, it now only just went past the top of her shoulders - she reached the decision at the time that the best way to help her get over Khan’s forced absence was to feel like she was cutting off the particularly bad nights of hopelessness from the last two years with her hair, and it was also so that there’d be less of her burgundy locks getting in the way of the combat action which would later be required during this breakout scheme. The same reason why she’d left her dress uniform’s peaked cap behind in Fletcher’s office. She’d already been making the planning for this whole escapade on and off starting from a year and a half prior, but it was one month before this current moment when she decided to actually go ahead with shortening her hair as an outward sign to herself that she’d toughened up and that she’d had enough of dealing with the injustice. </p><p>There were several hair-raising (no pun intended) moments of tension during the time it took to get to Hangar 2 and slide the key card through the slot, especially due to this tension being heightened by the very thing her sneaky movements were relying on: quietness. Another of these moments was when the door she’d just unlocked made a few clicking noises as its firewalls and locking codes came undone. However, although she was still looking around with nervousness to check that she hadn’t been seen, Zin had still made it to the room in which Khan was stored like some kind of merchandise product. She’d pictured it in her head numerous times, but she was still unprepared for the sight before her when she entered: all the dozens of Augment cryotubes were indeed packed in together in rows like merchandise, facing up towards the ceiling, and in this room, the lighting was more dim than that of the corridors outside. This particularly dim lighting and the vast size of this hangar alone made it seem even more like some kind of subterranean cavern than the entirety of the facility. </p><p>"Okay, where are you..." Zinalya muttered to herself as her eyes scanned the room in front of her for any sign from this distance of Khan’s tube standing out from the other seventy-two. After a few seconds of this search, she saw nothing, so she took a quick glance down at the countdown timer wrapped around her left wrist as a watch: only ten minutes and twelve seconds remained before she and him would have to be out of Sierra-Lambda 3. She promptly ran over to the first row of tubes before her, going from right to left as she peered through the glass of each of them to find out which one the man she was looking for was in, and after several more seconds went by in which she hurriedly moved on to the next row and ran past this second set of tubes, she found the different one. The one which appeared to have no frost on the inside thanks to the defrosting she commenced a couple of minutes ago, and which she instantly saw had Khan inside, as well. </p><p>She couldn't help it - Zinalya's face broke out into a relieved smile as soon as she recognised this face underneath the glass that separated her from its owner. Neatly combed jet black hair, porcelain skin, lean cheekbones and, although she currently couldn't see them through his still closed eyelids, she could still remember how glimmeringly blue his eyes were. During the last two years, on the particularly bad moments of despair, only one single, solitary sentence would run through her mind and leave room for no other words in there, <em>I want Khan back</em>, and sometimes she'd speak this out loud to herself or, on the times when they were there for helping her through it, to Scotty and/or Pavel. Suddenly remembering her time limit back in the present, which had now just gone under ten minutes, she quickly typed in the revival code on the buttons of the keypad on his tube, one, zero, zero, omega, eight, and omicron, simultaneously making sure that she didn't slip up and end up putting in any wrong ones. </p><p>"<em>Yes</em>." She cheered to herself, her volume no higher than a whisper, as the circular rim around the keypad dimly lit up as an indication of the passcode working. <br/>The in-built systems of his stasis tube had started the process of bringing Khan out of his slumber. </p><p>However, it was a very faint sound, mind you, but she still heard the sound of a footstep behind her, on the hangar floor's hard surface. </p><p>"How long've you been standing there?" She spoke out as soon as her ears picked up on it, and turned around to look at the newcomer as he gave his reply. </p><p>"Long enough to know that you're trying to wake up a dangerous man from an induced coma who's supposed to stay that way." </p><p>It was Perez, the second guard from a few minutes ago. The one who'd introduced her to Fletcher after escorting her into the facility along with the other guard who'd checked her "transport order" allegedly from admiral S'toia. </p><p>"Supposed to stay what way? In an induced coma or as a dangerous man?" Zin made a small attempt at easing her apprehension, which was caused by the fact that he was clutching his phaser rifle with it pointed at her, with humour, before she noticed a possible reason as to how he caught her like this. After she'd unlocked the door with the stolen key card, she'd forgotten to close it behind her again.<br/><em>Damn</em>. </p><p>"You know that what you're doing is illegal, commander. Step away from his cryotube <em>now</em>." Perez ordered firmly. </p><p>"The Federation court didn't exactly leave me any choice but to do this." She said back, her own tone of voice remaining calm despite the calculations and anticipation surging through her head like fluids through an intravenous drip. "As for stepping away, if it's all the same to you I don't think I will." After finishing this second sentence, she ducked down behind the tube to the left and in front of Khan's via a combat roll, causing Perez to try to fire his rifle at her as she did so but missing this shot, which she was thankful for. She drew her own phaser from one of her pockets and held it up firmly once again as she heard his footsteps again, this time drawing nearer to her narrow hiding place behind this other stasis tube. Even though she was prepared for the rest of the ensuing fight, the fact that this sound getting closer was ominous was a fact that was impossible to ignore. </p><p>"Commander Zinalya Hamilton, you’re under arrest for attempting to break Khan Singh out of his sentenced stasis imprisonment."</p><p>"I bet you say that to all the girls." She retorted, immediately afterwards sensing Perez’s presence above her and, as a result, swiftly getting up and initiating the hand-to-hand portion of the confrontation. She aimed her phaser at him for a second, but it was ripped out of her hand as, with his rifle, he shot it away, leaving her vulnerable as he then, just as quickly as she’d gotten up, used his fist to hit her across her face.</p><p>This was another thing that momentarily left her vulnerable, allowing him to grab her forearm that had been held up for grasping her phaser a second ago and pin it behind her back, but she recovered from the dizziness of the punch in the same amount of time and used her other, free forearm to swing back around to face him and deal a blow to the side of his own face, making his grip on her bound forearm to loosen just enough for it to free itself from his grasp. Perez gave a particularly rough punch to her stomach in return, dizzying her even more than the face impact a few seconds ago.</p><p>As much as she wanted to focus her main energy on cradling her abdomen, though, she forced herself to instead continue concentrating her focus on the adversary in front of her. This made sure that she was able to grab his own forearm when he took another swing for her face, leaving most of his torso to attack. Specifically, the attack this time was her pulling out the other phaser from her pockets as quickly as she could and successfully firing it at him.</p><p>Perez immediately fell to the ground, unconscious, making Zinalya use one hand to hold the area of her stomach where he’d been hit as, at the same time, she looked around behind her for any sign of the phaser that had been shot out of her hand before she drew this second one. More running was involved as she then went over to it when she caught a glimpse of its shining metal surface a few meters away, on the ground between some more of the many other Augment cryotubes. Luckily, after checking it over, it seemed to still be working. <br/>And then she remembered the thing whose keypad she’d been typing on before Perez appeared in the first place. </p><p><br/>She ran back over to the tube she’d put in the revival code for, and what she saw through the glass made her smile even wider than she’d done during this entering of the passcode for waking him up. <br/>Khan’s eyes were open, and his chest was moving up and down as a further indication of his now conscious state. He was looking up at her now that she’d appeared above him, these eyes of his conveying recognition. He’d spent the last few seconds of being awake in which his disorientation had faded away wondering how long he’d been asleep, whether it was now another entirely new era in time and maybe even somewhere around another thousand years on, but he experienced a wave of relief upon seeing her.</p><p>After, with some effort, she slid the tube’s hatch open, he pulled himself into an upright position with his arms on the sides, his eyelids still partially closed from initial drowsiness. </p><p>"Zinalya." He said, with the same recognition in his tone as what had been non-verbally shown just a second ago. His voice made her get shivers just like it had done on quite a few occasions before he was sealed away, a baritone purr which reverberated through the floor and around his environment as a whole. </p><p>"Khan." She wasn’t quite sure whether or not she wanted to cry again - actually seeing him awake again right now was even better than she’d imagined it for the last two years. "Do you... do you need any help...?" She asked him, slightly awkwardly due to this thought currently occupying most of her mind. </p><p>"Thank you." He answered before he got lost in the desire to just keep on looking at her eyes. Zin was the one person he’d met in this century who he’d found that he didn’t want to risk coming across as disconcerting to. "How long has it been since I was brought here?"</p><p>"Two years - it’s 2261 now." Zinalya helped him out of his cryotube via him holding one of her hands, this whole situation reminding them both of the classic fairytale <em>Sleeping Beauty</em>: a princess held in a tower, locked in an eternal slumber, and a prince who overcomes all odds to come to her rescue. Obviously the only difference in this case was that the genders were reversed for these analogical roles in the story. "You’ve got no idea how much I missed yo-" She was cut off as, as soon as his feet were on the floor, Khan put his arms around her shoulders and pulled her close to his torso. She leaned her head against his chest, catching the sound of his heart beating through it as she did so, and put her own arms around his back in return; something she’d noticed both while helping him climb out of his tube and during this embrace was that his body was cold to the touch, no doubt a result of the cryogenic stasis he’d been in, but it wasn’t the intense kind of coldness that made her flinch and pull away. It was instead the soft and soothing kind, as if he’d come inside from a downpour of rain. </p><p>"One of the last thoughts I had before succumbing to the sedative I was given was that I wished to see you again, as well." Said Khan, more quietly now that they were closer together. This time his voice resounded more deeply through Zin’s head and her own chest. "How did you get the opportunity to reawaken me? I can’t imagine your superiors being keen on the prospect of that." He looked down at her with a smile that was small but nevertheless beautiful, making her, too, retract her head and look back up.</p><p>"We had some time off here on Earth for some shore leave - me and the others on the <em>Enterprise</em>, I mean - so I told them I was going to spend that time with my family back in Manitoba, and one falsified torpedo transport order later, here I am." She replied proudly, still smiling now that, as she’d been yearning for for a while, the one and only man she had romantic feelings for was holding her in his arms again. Then her eyes widened themselves slightly as she abruptly remembered the time limit she had, making her pull back her left arm and look down at its wrist’s timer watch. </p><p>"What’s the matter?" Asked the Augment in concern at her sudden change of facial expression. </p><p>Six minutes and thirty-four seconds left until the backup power to the facility’s security surveillance systems came online. </p><p>"I wish we could properly get re-introduced right now, but I’ve got us a way out of here and we’ve gotta hurry for it to work." Said Zinalya, now having pulled both of her arms off again from his back and reaching into one of her pockets once again for her communicator. "He’s awake now. We’re about to head on our way out."</p><p>"My engineers are saying they’ve almost done making the transporter preparations, too." Responded the man on the other end.</p><p>"Okay, stand by for further updates on my end. If you don’t hear anything else from me before the time left runs out then it means we got caught."</p><p>"Understood. And good luck, commander." He bade her goodbye for now. </p><p>"Thanks, Iadras." She flipped the communicator closed again and returned it to the pocket from which it had come, before turning her attention back to Khan. "Can you walk on your own and fight this soon after waking up? Because as soon as we leave this room we’ll be going up against guards, and this place is practically crawling with them."</p><p>"I can, yes." A steely look appeared on his face, as a way of preparing himself for this combat that was soon to come. </p><p>"Here, I took this from that one who walked in." Zinalya took out the phaser she’d stolen from Perez after defeating him in their fight and held it out, which Khan gratefully took. He was very well aware of the fact that more often than not he didn’t need long-distance weapons like this, as he was capable of ending most confrontations at close quarters with either his fists or, on some occasions, knives, but his reasoning was that when you’re fighting an enemy force, the more firepower advantages you have on your side the better you’ll be, similar to Zinalya’s own reasoning when she took the phaser from Fletcher’s office. "They’ve got rifles, but as long as we just try to keep moving we should be fine. And the guy I was just talking to’s almost got a transporter lock on the other seventy-two tubes, so when we get out of here and get beamed up they’ll be brought up with us. It’s a long story, I’ll explain more of the details later." She then, both of the phasers she still had with her being held up in each hand, made for the door she’d come in through, Khan following. </p><p>The pair pressed themselves up against the wall next to this door, Khan behind Zinalya, to complete the final stages of making sure they were prepared. The same kind of steely expression he was sporting also showed up on her own face, and for several moments there was silence. There was absolutely and indubitably no turning back now.</p><p>"Are you ready?" He said, raising his own phaser. </p><p>"Yeah." She nodded, the tingling giddy feeling of resolve from her once more growing anticipation overriding a large majority of this anticipation itself. "Let’s go."</p><p>They moved through the hangar door and into the hallway outside. </p>
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<a name="section0003"><h2>3. Before You Start a War</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>The current goings-on reminded Khan a lot of his journey through the halls and deck levels of the USS <em>Vengeance</em> back in 2259: he and the half Trill who’d set him free making their way through the dim hallways taking up the interior of Sierra-Lambda 3, phasers in hand. Zinalya’s plan was to not go for the same direction she’d come in from, as the facility’s front gates were perhaps its most well-guarded area, but to instead try to go the other way and out the back. During the initial scheming stages around a year ago, shortly after she’d met Iadras and he’d agreed to help, she found a schematic of the entirety of the place, and also found with said schematic a few back doors which were available for them to utilise in making their escape. </p><p>They were taking a little bit of a stealthy approach to going about this, progressing through the corridors in a similar covert way to how she’d gotten to him while he was still in his slumber from Fletcher’s office in the first place, but they were currently less worried about being seen than she’d been during this part a few minutes ago. This was because there was now two of them and one of this duo was an enhanced superhuman, meaning the combination of these enhancements at play and Zinalya’s own combat experience in action - both from her experience as a security chief in general and from the extra preparations and training that she’d taken in private for the last year to make sure she was as well-prepared as she could be for this plan, which, so far, seemed to be a success - would be an undoubtedly tough opponent. <br/>However, this fact that there was only two of them meant they were outnumbered somewhere around fifty or sixty to one. And the security guards stationed here were trained for the possibility of Khan having been broken out, so this too was an undeniably difficult obstacle. </p><p>Because of her being the one more aware of the facility layout, Zinalya was at the front while Khan himself was on the rear guard, watching out for any opponents trying to make a sneak attack from behind them. So far they'd only had to stun two or three people they came up against, so that these two or three wouldn't go blabbing about seeing them to the rest of the guards, but they'd decided to just try to not be seen and to not discharge their phasers as much as they could, because it created noise, the very thing which could draw <em>more</em> of an audience. </p><p>"Only a little further to the next half of the floor plan." She updated him, shortly after which she momentarily became slightly startled as one of the scientists in white tunics also staffing Sierra-Lambda 3 came into view in front of them. Just for about a quarter of a second, the look in his eyes was confrontational, but instantly upon seeing Khan with her, this look eroded away quickly and was replaced, in the same amount of time, with them now becoming widened in intense fear. In this sudden fear, he dropped the data pad he was holding and legged it back the way he'd come from at a sprint before either of them could fire their weapons and stop him. <br/><em>Damn</em>.<br/>"Great." Zin spoke another version of this word out loud sarcastically. </p><p>"Don't be too concerned about him - our main priority is making our way out of this prison and into the outside." Khan, also feeling this same word in the back of his mind, gave her this reply instead. </p><p>"You're right." She found herself nodding in agreement, after which they continued on their way down this area of the corridor.</p><p>However, their above-mentioned combat skills were very soon called into action when they were practically jumpscared by the abrupt appearance of three guards, all of whom possessing phasers on their belts. <br/>"Don’t move!" One of them barked, all of them drawing these phasers.</p><p>
  <b> <span class="u">Imagine the Beastie Boys song from the other two AOS films, Sabotage, playing during most of the rest of this chapter. ^^<br/></span> </b>
</p><p>"I’m not really in the mood for taking orders like that so easily." Retorted Zinalya.</p><p>"I can’t say that I’m sharing that mood, either." Agreed the Augment, whose current attire of the black long-sleeved shirt and matching trousers and boots that he’d worn two years ago - the last clothes he wore before he was taken away and kept comatose in this cage - still matched the colour of his hair in addition. <br/>And then the physical aspect of the confrontation broke out. Zin swiftly pulled her own phaser and managed to get one of the three, sending him down to the floor, before the other two immediately engaged in the brawl as if the pin had just been pulled out of a grenade. The odds were slightly more evened out now that it was only two against two, but it was still somewhat difficult.</p><p>Both she and Khan were now in the middle of the hand-to-hand method, her moving around a little bit more to ensure she remained out of the grip of her opponent, as he was a muscular male which meant that the chances were higher of him being able to overpower her than the other way around, and this fresh-out-of-cryo man accompanying her relying more on the force of his attacks than on how much he himself moved. Khan exchanged facial punches with his own opponent, the ones directed at him having very little to no effect thanks to the enhancements in his physiology, while Zinalya dealt a roundhouse kick to the chest of hers; the impact knocked him back slightly, and Khan, meanwhile, eventually managed to defeat the one he was up against by grabbing one of said guard’s hands to keep it out of the way while the blow he dealt to the side of his head was hard enough to knock him out. The woman took advantage of hers being momentarily caught off guard by the amount of blows she, too, was dealing by tackling him to the floor, giving her the high ground for using her phaser on him. </p><p>"Are you alright?" The "superman" asked her now that this fight was over, her ever so quietly getting her breath back. </p><p>"Yeah." She nodded. "But something tells me there's going to be tons more of this yet to come before we get out of here."</p><p>The pair then took off again, this time at a run due to them suspecting that this time in which they were brawling could have been enough for something like a dozen more guards to have been alerted via the scientist they’d seen a minute ago. Although they’d both had frequent experience before in fast-paced and combat-involving situations like this one, and despite this threat of yet more looming opponents, Zinalya and Khan were unable to ignore the thrill of it as the air they sprinted through also passed through their hair. </p><p>"You were right - I believe the word for the number here is indeed 'tons' as you said." Khan commented as upon turning another corner, they were now heading straight towards a large horde of security personnel: there had to be about a dozen and a half in front of them at least.</p><p>Zin wanted to say the words "Oh god" out loud very badly, but she knew that would only serve as encouragement for the feeling of dread in the pit of her belly to grow, which had just sparked to life at this second when the man in black alongside her spoke; after all, perhaps the most difficult and trying part of the whole plan was about to commence, so the last thing she needed right now was for the burst of confidence pulsating through her veins to subside even slightly. <br/>The two ran headlong towards this horde, bringing their A-games within themselves online in just a matter of a second and a half, and then there came the frenzied brawling again. </p><p>This fight as a whole was mostly a blur, so they carried out most of these actions before they were even fully registered in their minds, but the pair made use of both hand-to-hand and phaser-based combat, Khan relying more on the former once again and Zinalya, like a minute ago, predominantly making use of the latter.<br/>She'd still never let go of the unfairness of what she'd been put through because of him being taken away and kept in his forced coma for "justice" - her hatred of how she'd been subjected for a long while to her future being ripped away from her - as despite everything he'd done, no one deserved to be put through the despair she'd had, and even for these crimes he'd committed she still, as clearly as two years ago, understood how he'd been slowly driven into it by others. So, as a result of this unwavering irritation, she allowed herself to let loose on these guards she and him were up against. It fuelled her frenzied attacks and combat moves, providing a little bit of extra assistance to her in the fight. She wasn't killing any of them, but she'd been looking forward to this part for a long time: getting to well and truly unleash her anger physically, as if she were getting revenge for the injustice done to her by bureaucrats who couldn't be bothered to look past Khan's exterior and were determined to only see the worst in him. The Federation court had wronged her, and if she wasn't going to stand up for what she believed in and take the matter into her own hands then who else would? </p><p>"Watch your flank!" Shouted Khan over all the noise, while currently in the middle of ducking and diving around the incoming phaser fire and holding off their opponents near to him with brutal punches and kicks, some of these kicks sending their targets flying thanks to his heightened strength. Upon hearing this, Zin looked around her sides and saw that, as he'd just warned, another guard was in the middle of rushing her. She had a split second, while still keeping track of the other chaos she was up against, to pull out her second phaser, and she managed to stun this guard right as his face came within three inches of her own. <br/>The Augment, although he, too, was still keeping track of the multiple enemies he was brawling with, couldn't help but feel a sense of exhilaration from watching as Zinalya then began to take down a little bit over half of the opponents around her with the twin phasers she had in her hands, twirling on the spot and making her hair fly around her head as a result while shots from these phasers flew in all directions. An angel of destruction.<br/>Khan, feeling like it was all somehow taking place both sped up and in slow motion at the same time, was sure that until now combat had never looked quite so beautiful.</p><p>"You sure you can get him?" A scientist asked another of his coworkers in white tunics, a woman holding a hypospray, with both of them hiding behind one of the walls at the corner back along the corridor which the hybrid commander and the prisoner had turned a minute or so ago to get to where they were now. "If you miss he's<em> not</em> going to give you a second chance." This male scientist looked the female next to him straight in the eyes. </p><p>"I know what I’m doing. I can get him as long as he’s still distracted." She looked back up at her masculine counterpart as she gave this reply of reassurance, and she then looked over her shoulder at Khan, still in the middle of his and Zin’s fight against the guard horde, and began to take a few steps of trepidation down the hallway towards him. </p><p>This group had now mostly been taken down except for a few, who were still battling the pair. Zinalya’s hair was now somewhat more dishevelled in a few places and there was a thin trail of blood trickling down from one side of her forehead, while some strands of Khan’s own jet black hair, although he didn’t seem to be visibly injured, hung over the top of his forehead. She hadn’t noticed this bleeding from her forehead, but Zin carried on with her frenzy of switching between using phaser fire and brute force, until, before she even fully realised it, all of her own opponents were down. And then, as she watched Khan finally defeat his last one by knocking him out across the head with the butt of the rifle he’d managed to snatch away, the sting from this injury came flooding into her senses, as if all the action of the moment had been some kind of non-medical anaesthetic. </p><p>"You’ve been hurt." He observed out of both concern and irritation at this being done to Zinalya, turning to face her and stepping closer to her, going around the dozen unconscious bodies surrounding them both, so as to inspect it further.</p><p>She put away her phasers back into the pockets of her dress uniform, the sleeves being a little bit torn after all the fighting so far, and used the fingers of her right hand to feel at the blood on this side of her forehead. "Oh yeah. They must’ve hit me pretty hard." Upon lightly pressing her fingers to it, the stinging intensified instantaneously, making her wince and pull her hand away again just as quickly. "I’ll be fine though, it’s nothing serious." She took a quick look down at her timer watch: a little bit under three and a half minutes left to get out of there. The tingling feeling deep in her stomach sparked back into life at the sight of this remaining time, while she was additionally getting her breath back.</p><p>"We should keep moving, so that we can still ensure we keep ahead of the countdown." <br/>As he replied, the female scientist behind them with the hypospray had crept forwards a little bit while the male one had ran off to assist some of the others with checking on the boot-up of the surveillance system’s backup energy supply. She was hiding behind another wall a few meters away, planning on injecting Khan with the hypo’s contents by running at him, because she and her coworkers were all aware of the specifications regarding the abilities he possessed: one of these was the ability for him to hear heartbeats from up to ten meters away, so she was keeping this distance at this moment in time in order to stay off of his radar, so as to speak, before she would run towards him. </p><p>"I think we’re something like two thirds of the way through now." Zinalya nodded in concurrence with his point, immediately afterwards momentarily turning her head just enough to see the scientist with the hypospray sprinting towards them at lightning speed, at which point she was only five or six feet away from the pair. Without thinking, Zin’s eyes widened in surprise and she leapt in front of Khan, whose attention was now grabbed by what was going on, right as the other woman in the white tunic would’ve thrown the tip of the hypospray to his neck and injected the contents into his body. In that single quarter of a second, it instead ended up happening to Zinalya due to this young officer’s sudden intervention. <br/>Almost immediately after the fluid from the hypospray entered her bloodstream through her own neck, she fell limply to the floor like a discarded coat, her eyelids mostly closing before they were fully shut a couple of seconds later. </p><p>"No. No..." Said Khan, to no one in particular as he caught her body in his arms when she fell, watching this closing of her eyes and the vanishing of her consciousness. In that moment, he felt a sense of helplessness at the fact that he’d been unable to prevent this - as if he were ultimately unable to protect Zinalya - but what also came into being in his mind and in the shining blue of his eyes was another, stronger wave of anger towards the scientist who’d done this, and who was looking with shock at the one with the burgundy hair who she’d ended up getting instead of her intended target. "What was that?" He raised his voice as he looked at the empty hypo in the scientist’s hand and then directly at her eyes, gently setting down Zin’s sleeping form before gripping the former’s neck in both of his hands, holding her up against the wall. "What have you just done to her?" Even though he was shouting, there was still a small level of restraint to it - a blend of calmness and rage which made him come across as even more intimidating. </p><p>"She’s okay, it’s a sedative, so she’ll just sleep for a few days!" The scientist gave her best look of defiance despite the predicament she now found herself in: being held up against a cold, hard wall with hands around her neck by a genetically engineered man who, in her eyes and like the view that most others there at Sierra-Lambda 3 took on the matter, was a terrorist without a heart. Was he going to kill her? </p><p>There was the silence of a pause for a few seconds. "Your name. What is it?" This time his voice contained more calmness, only having a non-direct edge of aggression to it. </p><p>"Baxter. I’m Dr. Helen Baxter."</p><p>"Would I be correct to guess that the sedative was meant for me instead of her, doctor?" He kept this aggressive edge in it, but his tone predominantly made a return to its natural, baritone state. </p><p>"Yes, it was meant for you." Baxter did her best to nod her head with this response, realising around that moment that she was indeed heavily scared. "But you’ll never get out of here - if not me then somebody else’ll manage to subdue you! And she’ll just be arrested!" </p><p>"If you’re making an attempt to dissuade me from leaving this place with her then I’m afraid to tell you that attempt is <em>not</em> working, Miss Baxter." Khan retorted. He momentarily loosened his grip on her neck so as to use his right hand to hit her hard on the side of the head, rendering her, too, unconscious after letting out a gasp at the impact. He then turned his attention back towards the still also sleeping Zinalya, turning around and gingerly picking her up off of the floor; she was non-enhanced, a member of what his fellow Augments with extreme anti-human views back in the 1990s (and the men in lab coats who’d given him these abilities in the first place back when he was five years old) had dubbed "the common herd", and this meant that compared to him, Zin was fragile. He might’ve been the one with the porcelain skin, but in his much stronger arms, she was the one with the body structure of porcelain. "Zinalya has just been sedated." He spoke into the communicator which he pulled out of one of her pockets and which he then flipped open. </p><p>"What? What happened?" Iadras’ voice of his own concern came from the other end. </p><p>"We were ambushed by a doctor who attempted to inject me with it instead, most likely in order to subdue me for returning me to my cryogenic tube. I’m going to continue through the facility and make my way outside by carrying her with me." He hoisted her body up so that, while still holding up her communicator with his right hand, her head was on his left shoulder and his left arm was beneath her waist, holding her up. There was barely any strenuous effort required, as his above-mentioned Augment strength allowed him to lift up a person much more easily. </p><p>"Do you want me to have a medical team ready to counteract it?" Offered the voice of the fully Trill man. </p><p>"If you could, yes. She’s additionally been injured on the side of her head, so that will be doubly useful."</p><p>"Fair enough - give me another update once you make it out." Said Iadras. </p><p>"I will." With that, he flipped the communicator closed again and put it into one of his own pockets, before using that hand to lift up Zinalya’s limp left hand for looking at her timer watch. <br/>One minute and fifty-two seconds remaining. <br/>With her still being carried by him, Khan took off down the corridor at his fastest running speed. </p>
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<a name="section0004"><h2>4. Woman to Woman</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>This part’s a flashback, so this isn’t adding to the main storyline going on but it does give a bit more of an insight into the early months after Undeniable’s sad alternate ending.</p>
          </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <b>Warning: Alcohol abuse in this chapter, and a little bit of angst but it’s mostly friendly comfort.</b>
</p><p>There was a crashing noise which resounded through the air nearby as a bottle of beer was accidentally dropped to the ground. </p><p>About a year and eight months ago, four months after the incident of the "superman" getting taken away and put into a coma in his cryotube, lieutenant Carol Marcus had just exited out of the San Francisco nightclub she’d spent the last hour or so in and was about to walk across the pavement she was now standing on outside, so as to begin the journey on foot back to her own apartment a few blocks away when she suddenly heard this sound. It was a high-pitched crash to be specific, so this was a giveaway to her that the dropped item was a booze bottle or something else made of glass, and the fact that it sounded like it was rather close by made her turn her head to the right to get a look at the source of the noise. </p><p>It was none other than Zinalya, leaning up against a drainpipe to her left which was mounted onto one of the club’s exterior walls and shaking slightly in silent laughter at her having dropped this half-empty bottle of beer. Her left hand, presumably the one that had been holding this bottle, was empty, but her right one was clutching another identical bottle, also partially empty.</p><p>"Oh hi!~" She greeted Carol upon noticing her presence ten feet away when she looked up from the shattered remains of the bottle that had fallen from her hand. Her smile grew even wider into an inane grin as she gave this greeting. </p><p>"Are you alright?" Dr. Marcus asked with her own amicable smile in return, although she already had a feeling about what the answer would be if Zin was sober - the latter appeared to be swaying and staggering somewhat on her feet. </p><p>"Yeah, yeah donworry!" Zinalya slurred in reply, her words crashing into each other. The laughter then picked up again, this time being out loud, as she looked back down at the smashed bottle, due to it calling to mind a metaphor: "This one I've still gohere's been left on its own while the other one's gone away - islike it's poetic orsomthing!" She held up the still intact other bottle in her right hand, the one which hadn't fallen. </p><p>Carol blinked and looked at her with concern at this comment. She’d heard from Scotty, Chekov and the captain a couple of times before over the last couple of months about Zinalya’s recently-emerged drinking bouts, but she hadn’t seen any of these instances firsthand until now. And even without recalling these mentions, it was still no mystery to her what it was that had brought on said drinking bouts. "Are you sure you don’t need any help at all?" The blonde took a few steps closer to the other young woman. "It’s rather late, so do you want me to help you out with getting back home again?" This other one staggering, swaying and laughing like she was served as a pretty clear indication of the fact that it wasn’t going to be entirely safe for her to walk all the way back to her apartment on her own. </p><p>"Eh... maybe. Maybe, yeah." The Canadian hybrid admitted feebly. </p><p> </p><p>After that, the next few minutes were the part that she could remember a little bit less clearly: Carol helping to guide her along the moonlit city streets, which were less busy at that moment compared to during the daytime due to the lateness of the hour, with the intoxicated Zinalya herself stopping every so often to steady herself whenever she experienced a moment where she felt especially dizzy to the point where she got an inkling that she might fall flat on her face.</p><p>"My flat's just down this street." Carol told her when they reached one particular neck of the woods. "It's closer to us than yours, so do you want to come in and sleep it off until the morning?" She offered. </p><p>"Yeah, thanks." Zinalya gave her another goofy grin. </p><p>It was mostly the conversation-oriented parts of that night that she could remember with the most clarity. After this exchange upon reaching Carol's street, she was led by this lieutenant with the shorter-cut hair down this street until they eventually reached the block which housed the latter's flat; with this process still being somewhat of a blur, they went into the building and up the stairs, Carol still leading the way, and then into the flat itself after unlocking it.<br/>
"I'll see if I can find a spare duvet for you somewhere." The blonde, after turning on the lights and helping Zin to sit down on the sofa in the living room without falling over, went off into her bedroom to begin this search. </p><p>This latter one of the two women, the one with the dark burgundy hair, laid down flat on this sofa, staring up at the ceiling while she waited and feeling like she had hummingbirds zooming around inside her head from place to place. She'd put down her beer bottle onto the nearby coffee table a second ago, but it did nothing to stop or even ease the dizziness of her drunken state - she let out a sigh of slight exhaustion and then additionally chuckled to herself quietly out of satire at the fact that she'd brought the drunken dizziness onto herself, evidently along with the need to get back to an indoor place with assistance. She squinted at the sight of one of the ceiling lights above her, feeling the inside of her head beginning to sting when she looked at it. </p><p>Her attention was grabbed another few seconds later as she saw, out the corner of her eye, Carol coming back into the room, appearing to now be holding a bedsheet and a cushion, both looking to be as soft as the other. "These were the best spares I could find. I’m sorry I couldn’t get anything better for you."</p><p>"No, no, it’s okay, these are just fine. Thanks." Replied Zinalya gratefully, taking this cushion and bedsheet that was handed over to her and putting them respectively underneath her head and on top of her legs. "So what were you doing out this late?"</p><p>"I was having some trouble sleeping." Answered the science officer, sitting herself down in front of Zin’s outstretched legs. "I just laid there for hours and nothing seemed to do the trick no matter how much I tried to drift off, so I thought I might as well pass some of the time and go down to a club or a bar."</p><p>"Why couldn’t you sleep? Is something up?" </p><p>Carol momentarily took a pause. "I was worrying about you. Dr. McCoy and some of the others told me about how they’ve spent this last month trying to help you to try and stop your reliance on alcohol whenever you feel upset about Khan, and I suppose I was also thinking about how you must have been really hit hard by what happened to have that reliance."</p><p>Zinalya nodded, before sitting up in an upright position and reaching for the beer bottle still perched next to her on the table with a sigh. "Yeah. I’ve spent these last couple of weeks trying to kick the habit but it’s hard, especially since that thing that happened isn’t just a temporary punishment." She took another swig from the bottle before putting it back down again, the concerned science officer observing this, and then also pushed it further away across the table to show that she was done with it despite it not being empty. "There, that’s it, I’m not drinking any more outta there."</p><p>It was now said science officer’s turn to nod her head. "Alcoholism isn’t good for you, lieutenant-commander."</p><p>"It’s okay for you to just call me Zinalya if you want." The half Trill gave a small but cordial smile, still sitting upright. "Can I ask you something too?"</p><p>"Of course." Carol’s expression mirrored hers. </p><p>"If it’s not a rude question, where did you get that British accent of yours from?"</p><p>"That's not a rude question, no worries." The smile of the weapons specialist grew in size. "And to answer it, I spent a large majority of my childhood before entering Starfleet being raised by my mother in London, so it's just stuck with me." </p><p>It was the city name which, at that second, caused Zinalya to recall the chain of events four and a half months ago that led her and the man she was missing so much into first meeting each other in those ruins on Kronos. <br/>
"Ah. London." Zin said with a smile of her own that soon quickly seeped away again as this train of thought came into motion, which Carol picked up on. </p><p>"I take it your own outing tonight was because you were thinking about him again?" The latter asked tentatively. </p><p>"I was. Even though these months have gone by it’s still always just the same thing that happens: for a few days I’m relatively okay and there’s no incidents, but then the deep thoughts about him come unexpectedly and within minutes I’m either crying like an idiot or just feeling drained, like I don’t want to do anything." While she gave her reply, she leaned back on the sofa. </p><p>"It’s not idiotic to cry about it like you’ve been doing. It’s like grief: everyone contends with it in different ways." The one out of the two with the lighter hair colour said reassuringly. </p><p>"Yeah but the thing is it’s like a vicious cycle with me - what I mean is when I start that process of deep thinking and then either feeling drained or crying, it also makes me think about everything that happened. The whole thing with his vendetta against Starfleet and the captain’s temporary death, and all the stuff with your dad. And then all that makes me feel guilty that we as the rest of Starfleet weren’t able to find out about the manipulation he was going through and put a stop to what your dad was doing; Khan told me back during the court case that I shouldn’t blame myself, but sometimes it’s just hard not to."</p><p>Carol looked down slightly towards the floor. "Truth be good I’ve felt a little bit of guilt like that a couple of times as well. And I’ve been thinking back to that moment on the USS <em>Vengeance</em> during those times: in spite of the things he did do there, Khan chose not to kill me. He had reason to despise me, but when he had the opportunity to do away with me he didn’t go ahead with that. And from the data received on the <em>Enterprise</em> after the incident, it seemed that he didn’t try to destroy us after he returned me and Mr. Scott and captain Kirk either, and was instead just trying to cripple us."</p><p>"So that he could have a better chance at getting away with his crew without risking killing innocents." Said Zinalya. "By the way, speaking of Kirk, what’s going on between you two?"</p><p>The English woman’s attention was now fully focused back on Zin. "I’m sorry?" A light chuckle laced her words. </p><p>"There’s a rumour going around that you two are a thing." This new turn in the conversation was helping the security chief with getting a smile to return to her face. "I mean come on, haven’t either of you two noticed the way you interact? It often looks like you’re behaving as if you’ve known each other for years."</p><p>"I’m afraid I haven’t noticed that, from the sound of it, but if that really is the dynamic me and him have then maybe one day we could be more than just crewmates." The discussion was having this same smile effect on both of them. "He’s kind, he’s handsome, he’s funny - he’s effectively housing everything I like in men. Including his cheeky bad boy personality." </p><p>"Are you going to tell him about all those things you like about him?"</p><p>"Probably. At some point in the future, but to be honest I don’t have the faintest idea when exactly because I didn’t even come to the realisation until ten seconds ago." Carol joked. </p><p>Zinalya nodded, the poignancy in the back of her mind making a return. "Knowing my luck I’m most likely gonna end up going to the grave without a husband or even a boyfriend." She laughed bitterly. </p><p>"No, don’t say that! You’re a nice person yourself, you make funny wisecracks, I’m sure it’s not going to end up coming to that."</p><p>"The only problem with that is that even if I do get the chance to hook up with some guys out there, I can’t imagine me feeling with them the same thing I felt when I was in his company. I’m doubtful about whether I‘ll ever meet any man that wonderful again." Said the one with the hazel-green eyes.</p><p>Despite the ambiguity in the word “his”, it didn’t take long at all for Carol to put two and two together about who it was that the slightly shorter woman who’d just spoken was referring to. "I’m sorry myself if this is an offensive thing to be asking, but did you think that something serious was going to come from you and Khan as an item? As in it would’ve become a serious relationship?"</p><p>"I thought so, yeah. I really, really thought it’d become serious someday." Her head fell down slightly to its right against the sofa by a few degrees, in the blonde’s direction, before she turned it while still in this position to look at her. "Now I’m stuck watching Spock and lieutenant Uhura’s own relationship going smoothly along with this possibility of you and Kirk getting together at some point too, while I’ve just been left with a hole in my life, and that hole’s basically stuck there forever. The guy I was having thoughts about settling down with in the future - the big one." It was at this point when her breath hitched in her throat, just for a second, before what she said next was a cross between both despair and anger, but mostly the former. "When I finally met that guy who’s the other half of my life, why did he have to get taken away like that? Why can’t I just find love like other people around me do?"</p><p>"It’s sad but bad things just happen to good people without warning, unfortunately."</p><p>"But there’s no logical reason <em>why</em> those bad things happen. And look at me: I’m a wreck! I can’t fully decide whether I wanna give dating other men a try or whether choosing not to makes me arrogant, and tonight I couldn’t even get back from the club properly without help!" </p><p>"It’s like what I said a minute ago: your predicament is like the stages of grief. You don’t have to know exactly what you want to do next in your life or how exactly you think and feel about the matter itself straight away, you can just start taking small steps in your own time. This is your grief so as to speak, so you can take as long as you like to go down the road of recovering and use whatever methods you like." Carol gave more of her reassurance in reply. </p><p>It was made more difficult by the presence of the growing mist in her eyes, but Zinalya smiled a little bit. "You’re pretty wise."</p><p>"Not really." The science officer shook her head with another chuckle. "But I’m serious - don’t think that you have to get over this in a certain amount of time to keep others happy or anything like that. The others wouldn’t want you to do that either, especially Mr. Scott and ensign Chekov."</p><p>"Those two have been amazing with helping me out whenever I’ve talked to them about this." Zin and Scotty both considered each other as their best friend, but Pavel was rather close with this duo in the friendship department as well, and she still continued, as always, to be grateful for the fact that she had this pair in her life. "Thanks for having this talk with me, Carol." She managed to get this sentence out before a tear each fell from both of her eyes, the left one travelling down somewhat further compared to the right one. </p><p>"That’s alright, Zinalya." As the two tears continued to trickle, Carol leaned forwards and provided her with a friendly and consoling hug, another thing that the recipient found herself grateful for. "How about I make us some tea?" The provider spoke again after a few seconds, her tone being the vocal equivalent of the hug. </p><p>Zin nodded her head in response, still smiling in relief at having gotten her current troubles out again. </p>
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<a name="section0005"><h2>5. A Leap of Faith</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>This chapter picks back up from part 3 after the fourth was a flashback chapter.  ^^</p>
          </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>They were everywhere. <br/>
<br/>
The Augment, over the last minute, was having no trouble with carrying the woman responsible for his rescue so far, whose body still remained unconscious as of this minutes prior - it wasn’t the physical weight of doing so that bothered him even in the slightest, it was the fact that it meant his arms were occupied and were currently less equipped for dealing with enemy combatants compared to when they were empty. From what he’d also found out in this minute that the rest of the guards, the ones that he hadn’t faced yet and that were still conscious, were practically everywhere: they attempted to come at him from all sides during his journey through the facility at his quickest running speed, to which he’d respond by either running off onto another direction or, when he felt able to do so without dropping Zinalya with the other one, swiftly pulling out his phaser with one hand and firing it at them. These remaining guards were like rabbits due to this above-mentioned fact of them being pretty much everywhere. </p><p>Ducking around a corner for a moment, Khan checked Zinalya’s timer watch by holding up this wrist it was on. <br/>
Only fifty-six seconds remaining. </p><p>He took off again instantly afterwards: he’d been mindful of this remaining time, deciding that he needed to be out of the building before it reached zero but that he also needed to not get out too soon, otherwise he’d be stuck hanging around and still dealing with more guards outside while waiting for this zero. </p><p>"STOP!" He was unfortunate enough to have to come to a halt where there were no sideways directions for him to run to, with the only way he could go being backwards. The very way he’d just come from and which led anywhere but out of Sierra-Lambda 3. This was because there were what appeared to be three guards and two scientists who’d just shown up in front of him, blocking every inch of that corridor’s width. "It’s okay, we’ve got no intentions of harming you. We just want to get you back off to sleep." The guard who’d shouted to him, the man standing in the middle, said. Khan noticed that one of the two scientists, who were both male with one of the guards being a female, was holding up a hypospray not unlike the one Dr. Helen Baxter has used to inadvertently sedate Zinalya. </p><p>"I’ve spent more than enough time sleeping." Khan replied calmly in the face of this threat, gripping a little bit more tightly to Zinalya in his arms with his eyes narrowing in both his protectiveness of her and his defiance against the system, the bureaucracy which had torn him apart from her two years ago only soon after realising her importance to him. "So I think I’m going to have to decline." He was covertly spending these seconds eyeing up a metal catwalk above this corridor which seemed to lead to a fire escape door high up on the wall off in front of him. </p><p>"It’s for your own good, and for the commander’s; just put her down, we don’t want to end up hurting you or her." The scientist with the hypo responded, his tone being non-confrontational and reassuring but the man in black nonetheless seeing past the surface. There’d been other men before, back when he was younger, who’d taken to dressing up their ultimately selfish goals and desires in a veil of idealism and noble reasons, most of whom also coincidentally wore white, and his most bestest friend in the world had ended up paying for these selfish goals of theirs with his life.</p><p>"I might have believed that my slumber is indeed for my own good three years ago, but at this moment I'm not quite so easily convinced." He retorted. Then, deciding he’d now wasted enough time, he swiftly checked Zinalya’s wrist watch again and went towards the five in front of him at full speed upon finding that there was twenty-five seconds left. </p><p>It was over again just as quickly as it had begun: once he reached them, he’d managed to quickly pull out his phaser once again with his right hand, and once he’d shot down a couple of them and physically knocked back the others in a brawl that lasted another few seconds while still clinging on tightly to Zin with his other arm, he felt sure that he had enough room to keep going. Thus, he kept on running towards where he found the base of the stairs leading up to the metal catwalk, kneeling down behind this base of the stairs while the ones out of the group of five who were still conscious shot at his direction with their own phasers. "I’m not certain but I believe I’ve almost reached the outside." He put his away again to now instead bring out and flip open the communicator he still had, raising his voice over the noise of the phaser-fire coming his way.</p><p>"You’ve got ten seconds left before we can get you outta there once you have made it out." Iadras, sitting on the edge of his captain’s chair on the bridge of his ship in orbit, replied, him and the other members of the bridge crew currently present watching the countdown timer which was displayed on their viewscreen, which was synced with the one on the wristwatch belonging to the young woman with the burgundy hair. "That medical team for Zinalya’s on their way to the transporter room and the engineers there have just told me they’re done getting the systems ready."</p><p>Khan got up from his kneeling position and, still carrying this young woman, ran up the stairs connected to the catwalk above now that the phaser-fire towards him from down the corridor seemed to have stopped. "Get ready for my signal, and be prepared to do it quickly!" It wasn’t by very much, but the urgency in his voice involuntarily increased as he held up the communicator while making sure he simultaneously continued to not drop the commander, all while making sure he ran as fast as he possibly could due to him seeing that the two remaining conscious guards and the scientist with the anaesthetic hypospray were also making for the base of the catwalk steps at their own highest running speeds. He was so close to freedom now, and he’d decided that he wasn’t going to let this plan of Zinalya’s to get him out be in vain.</p><p>Without looking back a second time, he made his way through the twists and turns of the catwalk until the fire escape door he’d found suddenly appeared straight ahead. Bracing himself for the impact, he turned slightly with his right arm out in front of himself to knock it open, feeling the metallic thud but no pain as such when this attempt was successful on the first try. <br/>
Sunlight. Cold but bright white sunlight instantaneously met his eyes, making him squint for a moment at this abruptness of its appearance in his vision. It had felt like only hours or even minutes since he was anaesthetised deep within that building back in 2259, but at the same time it were as if daylight was a luxury he hadn’t seen for much longer than just two years. </p><p>After this squint, Khan made his way up the other catwalk outside this fire escape door, which wound upwards towards the roof in a square shape and also downwards to the ground. When he was about a quarter of the way up, he looked downwards when he heard noise coming from this direction; down below, the three going after him had just reached the base of this outside catwalk at the door, and this glance caused him to find out that he was somewhere around fifty feet off the ground. The roof was bound to be higher, that was a certain fact.</p><p>When he was almost at the top, he felt himself weaken all of a sudden after hearing another burst of phaser-fire, very nearly dropping Zin, relying on the railing off at one side for support and fully dropping the communicator. When Khan then felt a second phaser hit get him, he was additionally hit in the process by a feeling of dizziness not unlike the kind he’d felt while hurtling heels-over-head through space when he got hit by the large debris piece during his jump with Kirk from the <em>Enterprise</em> to the <em>Vengeance</em> - the world, and even the galaxy itself, was spinning at a colossally high speed in all directions. Mind you, back when this particular instance in space happened, he was indeed and always would be capable of recovering from an impact like that and his disorientation fading away quicker than it would for a non-enhanced human, but both this occasion and the one that was going on right now made him feel somewhat helpless in the disorientation even though he didn’t admit it. He hadn’t felt this dizzy the last time he’d been shot numerous times with a phaser, so obviously the staff there at the facility had kicked up the power of theirs specially for him. </p><p>Luckily, though, he’d managed to regain enough of his balance in time to notice that the scientist holding the hypo, who was probably the one who’d just shot at him based on the phaser he was holding up in the other hand, was now no more than a foot away in front of him. <br/>
"This is just going to sting a little, but it’ll be over again soon." He approached Khan a bit warily, remembering his combat abilities, but still got out this sentence in a tone meant to calm him while raising the hypo towards the latter’s neck.</p><p>Just after this scientist had finished speaking, the two guards with him then appeared behind him on that part of the upwards-spiralling catwalk, moving towards Khan to attempt to restrain him with enough force to successfully stop him from fleeing from his impending second sedation. </p><p>"<em>NO!</em>"</p><p>The "superman" hadn’t quite expected himself to produce this scream in that moment as the three drew ever nearer and nearer, especially because of this fact that there was only three of them. As he proceeded to kick the scientist away with enough force to send him falling back down a small part of the catwalk with a yell and to make him drop the hypospray, before picking up the communicator as quickly as he could and sprinting the rest of the way up with the two guards in hot pursuit again, he thought to himself that he’d done it out of actual, genuine fear that he’d only felt a couple of times before in that century. He still thought it somewhat strange as he made this realisation, but he soon realised without saying anything about it out loud that it was because of the fact that he’d almost been ripped away again from the person responsible for his breakout. </p><p>"I’m outside, beam me up!" He yelled into the communicator straight after reaching the roof, looking around for a split second before deciding on running across to the edge in front of him that was the nearest.</p><p>"They’re getting a lock on you now!" Responded Iadras, his own voice now containing a similar urgency at the nail-biting tension of the situation as a whole despite him not being there in-person. </p><p>After this exchange, following which he flipped the communicator closed and put it back into his pocket, the rest felt like it was in slow motion, and yet it had all the exhilaration and tingling nervousness of another fast-paced action moment.</p><p>Khan sprinted like he’d never sprinted before, to the point where it was like his feet were barely even touching the surface beneath them and like he was instead soaring across that area of the roof. This was the first time he’d consciously noticed it that day, but his heart was racing to match this sprint. It all came down to this. </p><p>The two guards had only just started their own sprint after him across the roof. He didn’t dare stop now or even slow down slightly, as this was the final part of the escape. Every part of his surroundings was one giant blur. The wind flew through some of the locks of his jet black hair. </p><p>Within another few seconds, he was getting close to the roof edge he was heading for. <br/>
He could see, and faintly hear despite the rushing of the wind through his ears up there, some small dark blue-grey particles of a Trill ship transporter beginning to appear and surround him. <br/>
The edge was getting closer, along with the railings around it.</p><p>He took one last quick glance at the sleeping Zinalya, now getting a better look at the forehead injury she’d sustained, and as the edge railing off the roof came very close, the transporter particles around him were also increasing in number. </p><p>The guards chasing after him screeched to a stop when they saw what he was about to do next. <br/>
"KHAN!"</p><p>Ignoring this yell from one of them, he turned his head around for a second to give one last look of defiance in his eyes before he leapt up onto the top of the railing just as quickly as he’d been running and, now clinging on to Zin even more tightly than he’d done before, he leapt off of the edge of the roof and into mid-air as the transporter particles began to surround him completely like a curtain. </p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0006"><h2>6. The Photographs</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>A small feeling of a returning conscious state crept into Zinalya without her being able to actually register this return. The very first thing that she became consciously aware of, even though she still predominantly felt like she was sleeping, was the rather dim lighting in wherever she was - so much so that it was almost pitch black - and then it was the soft textures enveloping a large majority of her body.</p><p>Still not entirely awake and opening her lips ever so slightly in initial confusion, she craned her head around to this same ever so slight degree so as to try to find more details about her surroundings, stopping still again when her somewhat unfocused vision landed on the sight of another figure with her in the bed she seemed to be lying in. A taller, male figure with a little bit of a wider shoulder frame, whose face she managed to make out in the dim light of the room.</p><p>"Khan." She managed to smile slightly at this recognition of the figure in front of her, taking a few seconds to turn the rest of her body to fully face him. </p><p>"Do you remember what happened to you?" There it came once again: the deep, resounding voice which could only belong to him. </p><p>"I can remember shoving you away because I saw someone running at you and getting caught in the neck with the hypo she was holding, and I think that’s it." </p><p>"It was an anaesthetic dose intended to be used on me, so that they could return me back to my tube with as little extra required effort as they could achieve." Said Khan. "How do you feel?"</p><p>"Drained, but other than that I’m okay. Although my head does hurt a little." She nodded her head as further confirmation of her feeling predominantly alright. </p><p>"The friend of yours from the communicator sent a medical team to meet with us as soon as we were beamed away to safety. They treated your head injury while you were still sedated, and they gave you a reversal agent to counteract that sedation. The woman who did it to you claimed that you would remain asleep for several days without that intervention."</p><p>"I take it they wanted to use that kind of dosage strength because your biology makes it harder for normal anaesthetics to work on you?" Asked Zinalya. </p><p>"That’s correct." </p><p>"How long <em>was</em> I out...?"</p><p>"Only eight and a half hours: it’s currently half past eleven at night in in the Earth standard time of the facility’s location." The Augment replied. </p><p>"So... we’re out now? We made it to Iadras’ ship?" She asked another question to clarify as to whether what she’d been presuming for the last few moments was correct, noticing the faint humming sound of warp speed travel in the background of their conversation with her face beginning to light up.</p><p>He gave a nod of his own head. "We did - captain Mirehl told me that we’re on our way to the planet you and him chose for us to flee to."</p><p>"Ceti Alpha V." She said. "It was discovered a little while ago by Starfleet, but it doesn’t have any local intelligent life, no one’s staked a claim to it and it's kinda distant from Federation territory, and I thought its terrain and climates looked suitable enough. Apparently it's only four days away."</p><p>Khan fell silent in non-verbal reflection. He'd initially thought of this woman with him as another enemy and an unquestioning pawn of Alex Marcus along with her crewmates back during the incident that caused them to meet, sitting alone in his glass cell, and she'd gone and proven this initial viewpoint of his very, <em>very</em> wrong by doing so much for him: she overcame the odds in her way to rescue him from his perpetual sleep within his cryotube - whose more accurate title he thought could be his icy coffin - and she'd successfully engineered the rescue of his seventy-two friends and comrades, in addition, who were currently sitting in one of this Trill ship's cargo bays, still in their own tubes until they reached their destination. She'd proven that his reciprocated feelings for her weren't born from lies and ulterior motives she had in store for him. "You really have done everything, haven't you...?" He said quietly. </p><p>"What?" Asked Zinalya, not fully hearing this. </p><p>"You did all this - you've carried out a rescue scheme, secured the safety of my crew, and selected a suitable world to be our new home - so that we could live in peace together. You've gone above and beyond for us." Khan replied. Of all the non-enhanced humans he'd met, this one had shown herself to be, if he was being honest with himself, the most incredible. There was only one other non-Augment woman in his life he could think of apart from Zinalya who he'd found to be frankly brilliant. </p><p>"It wasn't all me. I did have help from Iadras, remember?" She smiled slightly more widely this time and lifted up her right hand to jokingly point upwards towards the ceiling, in indication of the fact that it was this Trill captain who'd agreed to use his ship as their getaway car to Ceti Alpha V. </p><p>"He did also tell me about his plan to mask the warp trail of this ship with a magneton pulse. It’s quite impressive." Iadras has divulged to him how he and his crew had a few days off for some shore leave of their own to use for carrying out this transport to the chosen planet, and how if anyone asked what they were doing away from Trill they’d say they were just checking on the cargo from some of their previous deliveries. </p><p>"Yeah. I met him about a year ago when his crew made a delivery to Starfleet Headquarters one day. He has been pretty helpful in all this."</p><p>"It was still born from your desire to get me out, however; it was your idea which set my escape into motion." He responded, before a brief pause set in. "The more I learn about you, the more convinced I am that I don’t deserve you."</p><p>"Don’t say that kind of stuff, Khan - what you don’t deserve is for you and the others to just be kept there forever without even being awake, stored next to each other in a warehouse like human-sized frozen meat." Her tone was mostly the soft kind of reassurance, but in the second half of her sentence it became somewhat more firm at the thought of what she was talking about. She’d been able to prevent it from going on any longer after the last two years, but the thought still irritated her. "But now we can have the peaceful life you do deserve, that you’ve <em>always</em> deserved, far away from anyone who’d want to lock you or me away or hurt us. It’s over." Just saying these two last words provided her with a small wave of relief at the fact that they were true. </p><p>He nodded his head once again, realising that she was right. "It is."</p><p>"I’m the same age as you now, too: I turned twenty-seven yesterday." She told him with a grin.</p><p>"I’m sorry I was forced to miss your birthday, Zinalya." Answered Khan, his voice having an undertone of humour but mostly expressing genuine goodwill towards her. "Did you take the time to celebrate it with your family?"</p><p>"I did; it was good to see them all again before I left this morning to come and get you." Zin was still smiling as she gave this answer, but it turned poignant as it then mostly vanished from her face, leaving only a look of uncertainty behind. "But I’m going to be honest with you here: now that the stage of actually getting you out and us managing to make it away from Earth without anybody tailing us is done, I don’t what we do now. I mean I know it was my choice, and I wouldn’t go back and change that, but I’ve basically left behind everything I know, and... that kinda terrifies me."</p><p>This point she’d just made reminded the Augment of the same feelings he’d experienced back in 1996, when he and his friends boarded the soon to be launched SS <em>Botany Bay</em> and were in the process of putting themselves into their cryosleep. "I understand." He gave this reply after a few moments of this second silent reflection. "But the both of us are in this newfound situation together, which means that we can both help each other with finding out what we do next." </p><p>"I guess you’re right." Said Zinalya. Over the last thirty seconds or so, it seemed that they both had things to learn from each other. <br/>And then she felt mildly surprised, like earlier when he’d done the same thing back in the facility, as Khan moved closer towards her in the bed and, without warning, put his arms around her torso, initiating a hug. Now that she was this close to him, she could see that there were a couple of cuts and bruises here and there on his face, most likely from the fighting he had to do to get them out of Sierra-Lambda 3.</p><p>"If you wish for me to stop, please just tell me and I’ll do so." His voice became more quiet now that they were this close together, and she responded by putting her own arms around him as well, fractionally more slowly due to the remaining after effects of the sedative. </p><p>"I don’t think I will, if that’s okay." She said back warmly, a slightly joking edge to her voice showing up, after which they continued to lie there for another few blissfully long seconds. They could take forever now if they wanted to. </p><p>"I’ll always keep you safe." Khan whispered in her ear - the woman he was holding in his arms was the only one towards whom he’d ever felt this new kind of necessary need to protect her. She was cherished by him just as much as vice versa. After then moving his head above hers, to which she gladly nestled hers into his chest, he said two words in the form of another whisper, this one being even more quiet: "Thank you."</p><p>A realisation was suddenly beginning to dawn on Zinalya for the next couple of seconds. Specifically, this realisation was of the fact that she still had something which she wanted to show to him. "Hold on, I almost forgot: I’ve got a little something for you." She retracted herself from him for a moment so that she could go over to her edge of the bed and lean over it, in order to reach for something currently located underneath, but as she carried out this leaning stage, she had to grip on to this edge of the bed tightly, because she felt like her head was beginning to spin from the inside out. </p><p>"Captain Mirehl’s doctor said to me that you should avoid strenuous activity to recover your energy." Said the man with the jet black hair in concern for her.</p><p>"I’m almost done." With her still growingly dizzy head dangling upside down, she was reaching around under the bed, through a spare bedsheet that had been wrapped up tightly to contain the item she was looking for. "Last year, a few months before I met Iadras, I asked Scotty and Pavel to help me out with a little favour." She finally managed to reach this item, which was a collection of three photographs that she held in her hands as she sat upright in the bed, looking back at the man with her. "It took a while because of how long ago the 20th century is now, but we did some digging to see if we could still find some photos of your mum after all this time, and we found these ones." As she spoke, he sat upright in the bed as well, and there was a sense of wonder in his eyes as she handed these three pictures over to him. "I know it’s not really that many, but I’d decided that I wanted to give you something to remember the early years by if I did see you again someday."</p><p>Khan looked through these pictures that were now in his hands.<br/>All three of them were of his mother, Sarina Kaur, the above-mentioned sole other non-Augment woman in his life who even came close to being as brilliant in his eyes as Zin; he guessed that the first was rather early on before the beginning his existence, as, unlike the other two, it was in black and white, having most likely been taken in the mid to late 1960s. This black and white one was a group photo of her and her laboratory colleagues, based on the fact that a large majority of them were wearing long white lab coats, and they all stood in practical businesslike positions in a long line, smiling at the camera. <br/><br/>For the second photograph underneath this, the fact that it was in colour suggested that the 1970s were drawing nearer when it was taken. It was of Sarina and her boyfriend who Khan had also told Zinalya about, Noonien Prasad, sitting close to each other on a grassy hill during what was probably the Summer or the Spring based on the brightness and warmth of the sunlight in the photo. They weren’t looking at the camera, and instead appeared to be laughing together at something out of the shot. Based on how healthy Noonien looked in this picture, it was obviously taken before he began to succumb to the cancer that killed him in the Autumn of 1969. And then there was the third and final photograph, the latest to be taken compared to the other two. Specifically, he deduced that it must’ve been taken in 1970. <br/><br/>This particular photo was of Sarina sitting in a beige armchair, presumably in her apartment, with her then-elderly border collie Cinder sitting on the floor next to her legs and with a certain light-skinned newborn baby boy being held in a little white blanket in her arms. She was beaming brightly into the camera, and the fact that she was closer to it than in the other two photographs allowed for the best look at her long, dark brown hair which mostly went down the first half of her back but was partially draped over her shoulders, and at her warm and soulful light brown eyes. </p><p>While looking through these three photos he’d just been given of his mother, Khan was smiling himself without even realising it. There were a couple of moments where his teeth were showing through this smile, causing Zinalya to think to herself that he had a slightly goofy but nonetheless handsome one and that she was happy for getting to see another of these rare moments where he wasn’t upholding his tough killing machine exterior. <br/>"Are you okay?" She asked when she saw the look in his eyes, which, to be specific, was a look of multiple emotions: a relieved happiness at gaining this closure of having the pictures to remember his early life and origins by, a feeling of being lost in memories, and a sadness that these happy days of his life were so short. Before her death when he was four years old, which then catapulted him into the series of events which led him to being turned into an Augment and ultimately meeting Zinalya in this current century, Khan’s mother would often call him her beautiful boy, and her unconditional benevolence and love caused him to sometimes think, back during this period when he was a toddler, that she was made of the sunlight itself. As he’d told Zin during his ongoing court trial two years prior, he may have been originally conceived for Sarina’s scientific research into singular-parent reproduction, the reason behind the difference in his skin tone and accent, but this had done nothing to prevent her from providing him with the love of a caring parent. <b>(He’s still given the photos after Undeniable’s happy ending as well, after the story’s finished once they’ve gone down to Ceti Alpha V’s surface.)</b></p><p>Khan looked back up again from the pictures and at Zinalya, predominantly at the tingly stinging feeling in the back of his eyes. It had taken several years, which had contained living on the streets, kidnap and becoming a science experiment, sorrow at the death of his closest friend, disputes with his more ruthlessly anti-human Augment brothers and sisters and the manipulation which triggered Into Darkness’ events, but he’d finally made it to the goal he’d been striving for for most of those years: a chance for him and his companions to live their lives somewhere with no worries. No more persecution. And the fact that he and the half Trill-half human woman who’d made this possible and who he’d discovered that he adored could initiate their relationship in peace made it even more fulfilling. "I’m alright." He smiled softly at her. "You just seem to be incapable of running out of ways to pleasantly surprise me." </p>
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<a name="section0007"><h2>7. What Happens Now</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>Thank you for making it this far! I wanted to ultimately give Zin and Khan a happily ever after for both the happy ending of Undeniable and the sad one which led to the events of this story, even if that sad ending involved more angst to get to said happily ever after. Anyway, thank you for reading What She Had to Do and I hope you enjoyed it.~  :3</p>
          </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p><br/><br/><br/>"Captain Kirk, commander Spock." Admiral Fletcher greeted the two newcomers who’d just been beamed down to Sierra-Lambda 3’s front gates, a day onwards from Zinalya’s successfully engineered plan to awaken and aid the escape of Khan. </p><p>"Admiral." Replied this captain courteously as he and Fletcher shook hands, the latter then doing the same with the first officer. Both he and his captain were wearing their on-duty Enterprise uniforms, having been contacted early that morning by the admiral about this breakout of the man sentenced to cryosleep those two years ago, along with the vanishing of the seventy-two other Augments who were still currently sleeping in their own tubes. </p><p>"I wish I could be talking to you under better circumstances, but this is all we’ve got so I guess we’re gonna have to do the best we can." Said Fletcher, before beginning his explanation of the events which had unfolded the previous day. "I’m told that somebody’s coming to carry out a transfer order of a batch of torpedoes kept here to Starfleet Headquarters, and then the next thing I know a couple of hours later I’ve got a phaser pointed at my head. When I woke up a few hours later, the cryotubes we’ve also been keeping an eye on here since two years ago had gone. Vanished into thin air."</p><p>"Every cryotube, sir?" Spock queried, somewhat amazed that such a feat was successfully accomplished. Sierra-Lambda 3 was one of the most secure Earth Starfleet facilities you could think of. </p><p>"Yep, every damn one." The older man in front of the pair of officers from the <em>Enterprise</em> replied, nodding his head in confirmation. "Except for one. The one containing the very man you went up against those same two years ago."</p><p>"Khan." Said Kirk, his voice dropping a notch or two in both pitch and volume at this name. </p><p>"What could one hope to achieve by taking all seventy-two of the other Augments only to leave behind him in particular?" The half Vulcan put forward another question. </p><p>"Khan wasn’t left behind, commander. He was woken up and took part in the escape that happened next - he’s the reason behind why some of my men are being treated for broken arms right now." </p><p>"Whoever did it knew the facility and managed to get in with that fake transport order, so it’s a foregone conclusion that they must’ve been a Starfleet officer." Jim reasoned, him and Spock both beginning to get a tiny feeling deep down in their guts, although they wasn’t consciously aware of this feeling’s presence yet, that who they were thinking was responsible for this might turn out to be the true perpetrator. They could, after all, think of only one person off the top of their heads who’d resort to doing this to break out the jet black-haired man from his sentenced slumber. "And they must’ve had advanced combat knowledge and experience to get past all your guards, even with his help."</p><p>"You’re right for both, captain. That’s why I’ve called you two down here and why the <em>Enterprise</em> specifically is involved: what do you know personally about a certain security chief by the name of commander Zinalya Hamilton?"</p><p>Spock and Kirk both exchanged looks with each other of their newfound knowledge that what they’d been subconsciously suspecting was indeed true. </p><p>"We don’t really know her personally as well as Mr. Scott and ensign Chekov do because the three of them have been friends for a while, but after Khan was brought here for his cryosleep sentence she was hit pretty hard by it." The <em>Enterprise</em> leader told him a few seconds later as the three of them entered into the front entrance of the facility alongside each other.</p><p>"She held a great deal of affection towards him." Added Spock, remembering the emotion of concern evoked inside his mind whenever he would hear about another of Zin's drunken nights which sometimes involved outings by herself through the city of San Francisco, to later be found by one of the others and talked to. "And she developed a reliance on beverages with a high level of alcohol content in order to assuage the sadness she felt in his absence."</p><p>"Yeah. She told me about the stuff she'd been through before she came here." Said Fletcher, the trio coming to a stop off at the side in this entrance, a few scientists and guards walking past them in a more hurried manner compared to yesterday, which was probably because of them having to check that everything else there was fine and to find out whether anything else was taken. "She said she ended up having to depend on what's at the bottom of a glass to get over her troubles even for just a couple of days, and said she used to try and fool herself that maybe he'd just come back on his own and walk in through the door if she waited long enough. Apparently she was thinking about everything that could've been and going over hypotheticals for a while, and said she felt justified enough from that to come and take him and the others." The way he said this last part of his sentence gave off a sense of someone looking down their nose at another person, prompting Spock and Jim to experience another recollection of their worry for her. </p><p>"Did commander Hamilton have any assistance from any other individuals outside of Sierra-Lambda 3?" Asked Spock. </p><p>"We don’t know - if she did then we’ve got no idea who it was. We think the programmed chip she used to disable our security systems might’ve been given to her by somebody else, but we can’t be sure who specifically or whether that’s even the case to begin with."</p><p>"And they got past <em>every</em> in-person security measure?" As he asked this question, Kirk’s eyebrows raised themselves by a few degrees, not quite sure whether or not it’d be morally incorrect for him to be impressed. </p><p>Fletcher nodded again. "The guards were armed with higher-powered phasers and the research personnel and doctors had hypos full of anaesthetic powerful enough to drop half a dozen horses at their disposal, and they <em>still</em> got away." His lips tightened slightly in irritation. "One of them, Baxter’s her name, said she tried to take him down with one but she got the commander instead, and some of the others told me they saw him carrying her away afterwards like a damsel in distress. Because she’s not a superman like him, she’ll sleep for a while, around a few days."</p><p>With Spock also thinking the same thing, the captain mentally realised that Zinalya must have taken that accidental sedation to stop it from happening to Khan instead: in combat situations she didn’t tend to get caught by the enemy easily, doubled with the fact that she had a big heart and they all knew how much she cared for him. If she had the chance to stop it, she wouldn’t have just let him be captured like that. "So what happens now, sir?" This same captain asked after a silent moment which took up this realisation. "What do you want the <em>Enterprise</em> to do?"</p><p>"Well, I’ve sent word out to the rest of Starfleet command and they’re considering going after them." Responded the admiral. "There’s no warp signature around Earth that matches up with the time soon after they beamed out, so they must’ve covered up that signature and ran for the hills, but they’ve decided the <em>Enterprise</em> is the Federation’s best bet for starting the search because of it being the fleet’s most advanced ship and because you and your crew worked with her, so you’ll have the best chance at getting her to come quietly. Especially ensign Chekov and Mr. Scott, being friends of hers like you said."</p><p>"What about Khan?"</p><p>"They’ve said you can use any means necessary to bring him back here so we can put him back into stasis, as long as he comes back in one piece, and once Miss Hamilton’s brought back to Earth they can hold a tribunal to decide on what her own sentence is gonna be; they think it’ll be something like a few years in prison. But they’ve told me they don’t have to go ahead with beginning the hunt so as to say if you turn it down." Despite this final sentence taking the pair by mild surprise, they continued listening as he explained this further. "Because of that fact that you’re her colleagues, they’re gonna let you guys have the final say: it’s up to you whether the search for her and our good old pal Mr. Singh goes ahead, so you’ve got a couple of days to decide but I don’t suggest taking too long on that."</p><p> </p><p>"He said it’s up to us?" Sulu addressed Kirk and Spock for clarification that what he’d just heart was correct, him and the other senior officers including Carol all standing together as a group in a meeting room onboard this ship of theirs. </p><p>"That is correct, Mr. Sulu." The latter confirmed. "The matter of whether the Federation begins the search for commander Hamilton and Khan is ultimately of our own choosing."</p><p>"They could be anywhere by now; how the hell are we gonna find them anyway?" Said Bones, adding to the conversation.</p><p>"Admiral Fletcher told us that we would have several other ships assisting us, allowing us to cover a wider area outside of Federation space." </p><p>"Poor Zinalya." Pavel, from a few feet away next to Scotty, commented in addition. "She felt so lost without him that she was pushed into doing this in the end."</p><p>"Aye, he did mean a lot to her. I can’t say I’ve ever seen anyone else change as drastically as her after Khan was gone." This engineer with him spoke his own mind out loud in agreement with what had just been said. He and the young ensign both often worried for her the most especially, as they were just as grateful for having a friend like her in their lives as she was for their presence in hers. It’s a universal concept that friends always look out for each other no matter what. </p><p>"And the look in her eyes when she talked to me about it all one night - it wasn’t just infatuation, what she felt towards him was definitely genuine. Nothing about that look was superficial." Said Carol, remembering this particular night she was referring to. "She must’ve decided that the only way to properly solve her troubles was to go to the root of the problem itself and undo it."</p><p>"It makes you think about that length of how much he meant to her for her to go ahead with a plan like this." Said Pavel. </p><p>"Captain." Uhura suddenly spoke up, looking at the screen of the computer console off at one side of this meeting room which she was stood near to. "We’ve got an incoming message, from her."</p><p>"What, from Zinalya?" Asked Scotty. </p><p>"Yes sir."</p><p>"Can you pinpoint where it’s coming from?" Queried Kirk, him and the others gathering round as the lieutenant sat down in the seat in front of this console, setting to work at opening the message.</p><p>"I can’t, it looks like it was rigged by her at some point yesterday morning to be sent to us at this time; this same message has also just been sent to the address of her parents in Canada." </p><p>"It’s gotta be something personal if she’s included her parents in it too." Dr. McCoy vocalised his own current thoughts, before the communications officer opened the message, allowing the video file which was seemingly embedded in it to begin playing.</p><p>It appeared to be a pre-recorded message in this video form. Its creator and sender was perched on a bed, presumably the one located in her family's home in Manitoba based on the casual decor and windowsill ornaments behind her. Outside this window, which was on one side of the video frame and located behind her head, several trees and pieces of greenery here and there could be seen, along with a small portion of a light blue-grey sky. This Zinalya in the pre-rec video quietly sighed for a moment, before she began to speak. "<em>If you're watching this, then it means one of two things: either I did it and I've managed to get Khan out, and we're pretty far away by now, or the worst case scenario I could think of has happened and I'm locked up in a prison cell.</em>" She chuckled lightly to herself at this second possibility, most likely in an attempt to add even just a slight atmosphere of humour to a worrying thought.</p><p>"<em>But whichever of those two has happened, I guess I owe you an explanation. For a while, as you might know already, I've been struggling a lot with coming to terms with the fact that he's gone, and I have a little beer and vodka problem sometimes because of that</em>." She continued, her now former cremates still watching and not daring to tear their eyes away or to speak yet. "<em>And that's not right, basically. No matter what happened that led to all this, this sentence he'd got... it's not justice</em>." Zin took another brief moment to pause before she launched into her main point. "<em>No one</em> <em>should have to live with having the person who they find out they love taken away from them forever. Him being medically knocked out and kept knocked out indefinitely in the name of a punishment to control him is a half life, if you can even call it life in the first place - it's just death with a pulse. That's all this time without him has been for <span class="u">me</span>, too. A half life</em>." She then seemed to be stuck for what exactly to say next, smiling to no one in particular for a couple of seconds as a result.<br/>"<em>This whole business of getting my feelings out into words is harder than I thought... but I guess I'm gonna have to carry on and just do my best. I had high hopes, you guys. I felt scared and electrified with him both at the same time, and</em> <em>the way I couldn't stop thinking about him was all I needed to convince me that I had those kinds of feelings for him. I know by the end of the court trial and everything I'd known him for a total of a week, but a couple of times being around him was like I'd known him for years and years. As far as I can remember Khan was the only man I felt that strongly about in my life; I had plans, I can't remember a time when I haven't wanted to ultimately end up getting married </em><em>someday to guy I love and maybe even have children later. When Khan was suddenly gone and sent to sleep in some science facility hangar by the Federation authorities, it was like those plans had been taken away with him." </em>The already poignant look on her face grew a little bit in intensity.</p><p>"<em>I tried getting my head back into the dating game after a while, see if I could find anyone else who could be Mr. Right, but that didn't work. None of them turned my head like he did. So that's when I decided, somewhere around a year ago, to do this. To wake him up again and get him back myself, I mean if the Federation won't let us go to a new home, I guess we're gonna have to go anyway. Worst case scenario as I've said is that I'll end up getting caught and thrown in jail for trying it, and even then it's a case of still having a warm bed and three meals a day. And I will have given it a try and gone down fighting." </em>Another pause momentarily set in. <em>"I digress, though. The main point behind why I'm recording this right now and why I'm going to set it to get sent out after I'm done is because I want to say goodbye - I'm not going to get into the stuff that happened in court and the decisions that were made, I'm just going to tell you guys that I'll miss you. Talking honestly, I don't know when or even </em><span class="u">if</span><em> I'll ever see you again, but I love all of you, and I wouldn't have traded the years I've had with you for anything." </em>Another smile appeared on her features. A smile that soon grew to be wider than those belonging to her previous chuckles so as to express her happiness, which seemed somewhat bittersweet at this moment due to this goodbye she had to make to her family and friends. "<em>A new kind of adventure's waiting for me. So long, everyone.</em>" </p><p>And then the video ended.</p><p>For the next moment or two that followed, the crew still remained silent, and so did her brothers Enaar and Rajen Hamilton and their parents Mason Hamilton and Siazru Tebal, who had all just additionally watched this pre-recorded video message in the places where they were located on Earth. </p><p>"It seems that commander Hamilton chose to take any means necessary in her <em>own</em> goal." Spock was the first to break this silence in the meeting room. </p><p>"Well, I’m happy for her." Scotty then added, nodding his head and feeling relieved that he had visual closure to back up what had happened being his best friend’s choice that she alone made. Although he was sad that she was now gone, a small smile made an appearance on his face. "I know the way she did it might be a bit illegal, but I’m glad that lassie’s managed to ride away into the sunset with Khan. It means she gets to be happy again - <em>truly</em> happy."</p><p>"And by ‘a bit illegal’ you actually mean <em>very</em> illegal?" The helmsman asked jokingly. </p><p>"You get what I mean, Mr. Sulu." Chuckled the Scotsman in reply.</p><p>"I’m happy for her too; we still did our best and it still helped for at least a while, but there was only so much we could do to help her cope with what she was going through." Said Chekov. "In the end, undoing the fact which was causing that was the only way she could go back to fully feeling like herself, if that makes sense."</p><p>"Yeah, I get that." Bones said in response to the Russian with a nod of his own head. "I know I’m don’t normally take part in sappy crap, but I guess you’re right: her gettin’ Khan back and running away with him was the only way to get the old Zin back too. The old Zin who had that... I don’t know, some kind of twinkle in her eyes like every day was some kind of new adventure. Or else God only knows how long she’d still be going over not being able to see him or talk to him again." </p><p>"What should we do, sir? Should we go after them?" Uhura, turning around in the chair she was still sitting in, queried.</p><p>For a few seconds, their captain still didn’t speak. The inside of his mind was a battleground with all the thoughts, options and arguments in this matter at hand crashing around within their walls. He had a duty to Starfleet and to the Federation, to make sure that Khan, a convicted criminal, served the rest of his indefinite cryostasis sentence as ordered by his court tribunal those fateful two years prior and to also ensure that his now former security chief answered for her own crime of awakening and aiding the escape of said convicted criminal.</p><p>However, another duty that he simultaneously had along with this one was to her as one of his trusted crewmembers and companions. He didn’t want to trample on her freedoms and happiness or that possibility that she could be able to help Khan with becoming a better man in their exile together, as she’d said during the above-mentioned court case when asking for this ultimately declined exile. <br/>Admiral Fletcher had, after all, told him and Spock that whether the Federation fleet began searching for the couple was up to them. <br/>Jim looked around at the remaining members of his senior crew, ending with his gaze landing on Carol.</p><p>"No." His answer came. "If nobody has any objections, we’re going to not go out looking for them or send any other ships from the fleet to do the same. We’re just going to leave them alone and let them go." </p><p>"So that Miss Hamilton can be given a chance to amplify good traits within Khan." Spock, who seemed to have been thinking along the same lines, added. <br/><br/>"Spoken like a true romantic." Nyota remarked, this being with a small edge of a lighthearted joke but with the soft, loving look deep within her eyes conveying one simple fact: she was glad that he’d managed to grasp the emotional side of the situation. </p><p>"I do, however, also agree with the point made by Dr. McCoy, ensign Chekov and Mr. Scott. This could be her only chance for reclaiming the joy she lost after he was sentenced."</p><p>"Even if we do end up probably not seeing her again, she’ll be okay - she’s a fighter." The CMO, deciding for now to not once again voice his opinion on his ongoing discomfort at the first officer’s concurrence with him, said. </p><p>"You’re right. I’m sure the two of them will be able to count on each other if they do face some form of threat in the future." Carol expressed her own agreement with this latest statement. </p><p>Realising the fact that all of these others around him were speaking the truth of the matter, Jim nodded, and slowly began to smile. "They’re gonna be alright."</p><p> </p><p>"Do you think she’s going to be safe with him?" Mason Hamilton asked, he and his Trill wife still pondering on the possibility of them perhaps never seeing their daughter again due to her technically now being a fugitive.</p><p>"Of course she will. She chose this, and you and I both know she’s a smart woman, so she wouldn’t have made that decision if she hadn’t weighed everything up." Siazru replied reassuringly while sitting next to him on their living room sofa and putting her hand on his shoulder in the same manner. </p><p>"You are right there. You’re always right." He chuckled fondly, before looking out in front of him, staring into space while still maintaining his attention on his surroundings at the same time. "And I'd be a liar if I said I didn't still love her with <em>every</em> decision she makes." <br/>Siazru nodded, agreeing with this point of his. </p><p> </p><p>"Can I ask you something...?" <br/>Meanwhile, the now twenty-seven lady of the moment put forward this question quietly in the darkness of the quarters onboard Iadras' ship that she and Khan were using until their arrival at Ceti Alpha V another two days on from then. She'd been told to just rest in bed until this arrival, in order to recover her energy back from the efforts of this Trill captain's medical officers to counteract the sedative from yesterday - anaesthetic intended for use on Augments and the physical enhancement of theirs that allowed them to be more resistant to sedation. </p><p>"Hm?" This baritone-voiced man laying with her in this bed responded. The lights were turned off due to it being late at night and the pair deciding as a result that they should get some sleep, so it took a few minutes but they were currently able to faintly make out each other's outlines in this darkness of the room. </p><p>"When you were in cryo, did you dream?"</p><p>"Are you referring to the most recent occasion, or to the previous instance which lasted over centuries?" Khan made his own query for further clarification.</p><p>"Either."</p><p>He thought for a moment or two. "I'm not entirely certain. Most of what you might call my dreams were no more than fleeting images and sounds, and even then it's impossible for me to fully recall every one of them."</p><p>"So it was like how people dream during normal sleeping? How people get a kind of feeling of déjà vu when they're trying to remember one but they can't <em>actually</em> remember anything?" Said Zinalya. </p><p>"I suppose it is. From what I can remember of my dreaming whilst I was in stasis on both occasions, the images I saw were mainly memories from my life, some of those experiences being good ones and some being less so, and I believe I have vague memories of seeing the sky in my dreams, as well." He gave his answer to the main question which had brought this conversation into being. "Both times after awakening again it was like my physical body and one half of my mind were saying it was only moments since I went into sleep, with the other half knowing that it had been a much longer time. But I think we should try to begin with the average method that applies to everyone."</p><p>"Yeah - agreed." She admitted to the current tiredness she was experiencing. "Goodnight, Khan."</p><p>He smiled in soundless bliss. "Goodnight, Zinalya." </p><p>The hybrid with the green eyes, burgundy hair and Trill spots dotted sparsely on the sides of her forehead and neck found herself returning this same expression as, with her having no objections to it, Khan once again gently pulled her closer towards his chest with his arms around the back of her shoulders. </p>
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